Ancestry.com vs Family Search…a Dilemma
Based on time constraints a choice may be in order.
My wife Anna and I have been casually building out our family trees for more than a decade now. I’m not sure anything we’ve stuck to for more than a decade would be considered casual, but our on again off again approach, as well as our general lack of scholarly rigor, would most likely make that classification appropriate. We were fortunate enough to be given an invaluable head start by several other family members who’s jobs were immensely more difficult without the benefit of the internet.
Like many others, we’ve used a number of different software platforms, only to be left abandoned by acquisitions, poor business models, or our own implementation problems. They are too numerous to recall. Ultimately, we found our way to Ancestry.com, and have not looked back, entering every scrap of what those before us have provided and added anything additional we could over time. My own contribution has been to chronicle as much of our family’s photographic evidence as possible in an effort to eliminate photos of people no one remembers that will remain unlabeled forever, and eventually certainly discarded as a result. We’ve gathered a lot of photos, and I feel good I’ve done my part and more to preserve them in cyberspace for the benefit of those that will follow. Things can always be better, but sometimes you have to call the game and say good is good enough.
We’ve been paying subscribers to Ancestry.com since November 2008. I don’t its exact cost over time, but am certain it has cost the equivalent of those original software programs many times over, so great job developing your business model Ancestry.com! And I am not complaining. The tools provided have been incredibly helpful, and the ability to share and gather important documents and photos related to descendants has been great. Ancestry.com is a terrific ancestry discovery tool. And we, or at least I, was perfectly content.
And then it happened. Some time ago one of Anna’s relatives wrote to us via Ancestry’s message function and inquired about a photo. She also casually mentioned she now worked(or volunteered, I’m not sure) for LDS, and suggested we take a look at FamilySearch. I did, and entered some basic information to get started. It seemed to have promise, and was free, but Ancestry.com still seemed to have superior media capabilities and I thought, at the time, a larger, deeper network, so I left it at that.
Several years passed, and I generally only spend any time on Genealogy during the cold days of winter when I am stuck inside. Something prompted me to take another look at FamilySearch, and now, a dilemma. It is good. Really good. And while I definitely don’t subscribe to the beliefs of the LDS, our interests are aligned when it comes to genealogy, and they have built a tremendous platform. And as compelling or more compelling than any other feature, its promise of persistence is extremely attractive.
So this winter I’ve dedicated to building out as much as I can on FamilySearch. All the work we’ve put in on Ancestry.com has made it easy. It’s media tools are tremendous, and that is now where I find myself spending time on the photos that I am so interested it. I don’t know that we need to make a choice between Ancestry.com and FamilySearch right now, but I can see our information between the two quickly falling out of sync…any chance two competitors would be interested in developing a sync functionality? I didn’t think so. Our subscription to Ancesty.com may be in jeopardy, and I’m sure I’m not alone.
